Movable Type 4 to go open source

Anil Dash of Six Apart has let the cat out of the bag on his blog: The next release of Movable Type (MT), one of the most popular blogging platforms, will have a version released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). A beta of MT4 is available now, though not yet under the GPL.

According to Dash, the company took a cue from contributions to memcached and OpenID in deciding to release MT4 under the GPL:

From LiveJournal, we've learned how important it is to support open, engaged communities, and so we've brought over technologies like OpenID and support for Memcached. But we've also seen what amazing contributions the open source community makes, and how much more comfortable people feel knowing that, instead of data lock-in keeping them tied to their blog, an open process of development makes them want to participate. And that's greatly influenced MT4's new open source initiative: Later this year the open source version of Movable Type will be released under the GPL license.

The MT4 release includes standalone pages that inherit your blog's format, a built-in registration system, and a rich Web editor for WYSIWYG posting with insertion of photos, audio, and other files. This release also allows users to pull posts from multiple blogs onto a single page, and a new templating system.